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Captivate and Moodle

Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Hello, I've recently completed 2 e-learning modules for a client that features quite a lot of animation made within After Effects, and exported as H.264 mp4 files. The animations are then placed within questions related to them. The Captivate project is then published and has to be uploaded to Moodle via SCORM.

 

My client is having 2 issues, the first being the issue with the manifest. I've attached the steps I've taken, with renaming the SCO Identifier to imsmanifest, which I believe to be correct. I've also attached the error that they see. Could you tell me what I could be doing wrong here?

 

The second issue is the file size, which I know is obviously to do with the video sizes. Both clients have said the files exceed their Moodle limits. Module 1 is around 680mb and Module 2 is around 890mb. Apart from going through the individual animations and reducing their quality, are there other solutions? For example, if I were to host the video files on my own server, and have them link and play from there, would this help? 

 

I'd be grateful for any information you could give me, thank you.

 

Paul

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Community Expert ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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In your Manifest dialog is not set up correctly. You still have the default Course ID that Captivate starts out with.  Course Title should just be the name of the course that you want to appear by default in the LMS.  

 

It appears that your LMS probably automatically names the SCORMs based on the actual name of the course.  This is to ensure that the Course Identifier and SCO identifiers are unique on the LMS and avoid potential reporting conflicts with other courses. 

 

For the Course ID, check with your Moodle LMS Administrator to see if they have any specific naming conventions for course IDs.  If not, just give it a 'complexish' name that is based on the title of the course, but using either CamelCase or underscores instead of spaces. (E.g. MyVeryComplexCourseName2019 or My_Very_Complex_Course_Name_2019).

 

Similarly, the SCO IDs need to be unique within the course.  What I normally do is prefix the SCO ID with the Course ID to ensure there is absolutely no possibility of conflicting.  (E.g. MyVeryComplexCourseName2019_Module01, MyVeryComplexCourseName2019_Module02, etc.)

 

It's obvious you misunderstood what the SCO Identifier field should contain. 'imsmanifest' is not a valid SCO ID.  The SCO Title field should just contain the name of the Course Module, or if there is only one module in this course, then you might just put the Course Name there as well.  The important thing is that the Course ID and SCO ID should both be unique, not the same.

 

And lastly, the error message that you are getting about the imsmanifest.xml file not being found in the root of the zip file is probably because you made the mistake of just zipping up the folder containing all of the course files after making your edits to the manifest.  This puts everything one level too far down and the LMS will reject the SCORM.  The trick is to go INSIDE the folder, select everything there and create the zip file that way, not from outside the folder.  That's the way Captivate zips the SCORM.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Hi Rod, thanks for your reply, it really helps. So I've renamed the course identifier 'UMH_M1_Ident' and the SCO identifier 'UMH_M1_Ident_ModuleOne' do you think this would work?

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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I'm unsure of what to do with the SCORM folder that you've explained. So Captivate produces a zip folder, do I then unpack this, go into that folder and move the contents into a new folder?

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Community Expert ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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As I said, when Captivate creates the SCORM zip it does it in a certain way that ensures the imsmanifest.xml file is at the rool level when the SCO is unzipped. Unless you are in some way modifying the SCORM zip Captivate creates, just leave it as is and it should be fine. But you mentioned something about inserting MP4s into the mix. If you do this, you need to make sure you don't change where the manifest ends up.

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Community Expert ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Yes this naming should work.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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This is the content of the published folder, does anything look incorrect?

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Community Expert ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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This looks fine. The manifest file is in the right location. But you need to upload your course to the LMS as a zip file, not a folder full of files like this. The zip file has to contain all of these files, but it must be created by selecting all of the files from WITHIN the folder, not just by zipping the folder itself. Do you understand?

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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I do understand now thank you, I was just a little confused by the wording. I am getting an error however. If I were to unzip the published folder as soon as it's came from Captivate, then create a new folder, and then re-zip the published folder and place it into the new folder, would that work? I hope that makes sense.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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The folder named 'callees' is empty and causing the issue, can it be removed?

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Community Expert ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Why do you think that empty folder is causing the issue? The error message you showed before was saying the manifest file wasn't at the root level of the zip archive. It didn't mention anything about the callees folder. Has there been a new error message?

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Community Expert ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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OK I see your new error message now. Yes you can delete the callees folder if it's empty. But I have never had to do this in order to create the zip archive. Perhaps it's because I use Winzip rather than the default Windows compression zip utility.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Thanks for your patience with this. Now that I have managed to zip this folder from within the original folder that was published, if I were to send the Winzip folder to the client, would this work for them?

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Rod I believe I've got everything to work in Moodle's test environment, so it's off to the client now, thank you so much for your help and patience on this. Hopefully I won't have to come back to you again!

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Advisor ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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The default max upload file size is 256MB but you might have a conversation with the Moodle admin about making a modification of the php.ini file to increase that limit - even if only temporary.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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I've put in a request for them to do that if they can, still waiting to here back.

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Community Expert ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Even if you DO increase the maximum allowed upload file size, you are still going to run into issues with huge delays when learners try to access those videos. Your modules are way too large (in my opinion). It's too late now, but I would have suggested you look into using Adobe Animate to create the animations rather than Adobe After Effects. It would have given you OAMs with filesizes that were likely only a fraction of the size you are now dealing with.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Thanks Rod, unfortunately Animate would not be suitable for the type of animated content that we have used. I am going to try and host all video content on my own server, and link to there to see if this will help.

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Community Expert ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Unless your web server is a streaming media server that is capable of serving up versions of the video that match the end user's bandwidth, I don't think you will be any further ahead. I suggest you look into hosting your MP4s on Vimeo or YouTube and let them take care of the streaming issues. I have used Vimeo for this sort of thing because there are ways of locking out people who shouldn't be allowed to view the content.

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Community Beginner ,
Oct 02, 2019 Oct 02, 2019

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Ok great, I'll give that a go instead just in case.

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